Steven Cordova

Born and raised in San Antonio, poet Steven Cordova was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. After moving to New York City in the 1980s, he joined the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, participating in poetry workshops and forming an ongoing writing community with the writers he met there. Cordova is the author of the poetry collection Long Distance (2009), and his poetry and prose are featured in several anthologies, including Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (2011), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007), and Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).

With tender frankness and wry humor, his poems chronicle the personal and political turning points in the life of an HIV-positive gay man living in New York City. In an interview for the Almost Dorothy blog, Cordova stated, “Writing the truth is not the same as telling the truth. The former allows for creativity; the latter demands face-to-face exactingness. Once you realize that, writing about the personal gets easier.” As poet Rigoberto Gonzales noted in a review of Long Distance for the Lambda Literary Review, “In the end, Cordova’s affirmation of living as a gay man with HIV is … the precarious balance of vulnerability and strength, darkness and light.”